Enterprise desktop management is one of the most challenging tasks for Information Technology (IT) departments of large organizations today. A typical IT department needs to manage, protect, and distribute software updates and modifications, upgrade operating systems and applications, as well as be able to back up and restore the user's data and settings on demand. One issue for IT departments is the complexity of managing a large number of different desktop instances that may exist on the computers of enterprise users. The sheer number of user computers to manage; the proliferation of operating system (OS) images and applications; and the complex set of operations, such as deployment, provisioning, patching, upgrading, installing and managing applications, compliance testing, troubleshooting and re-imaging; all make IT responsibilities a very challenging task. To compound these difficulties, today's enterprises are often dispersed over multiple geographic locations and the use of Local Area Networks (LANs) connected over one or more Wide Area Networks (WANs) with variable bandwidths and latencies is a serious barrier to providing efficient desktop management without sacrificing end user experience.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) can provide some aid to IT departments by virtualizing the desktops of individual end users. In a conventional VDI environment, each user in an enterprise is provisioned a virtual desktop and is allowed to access their virtual desktop over a remote network connection, such as a WAN connection. The virtual desktops are typically hosted on servers that reside in a data center of the enterprise (or a third party service provider), and each host server may execute multiple virtual desktops. Users can utilize a client device to remotely log into their individual virtual desktop and all of the application execution takes place on the remote host server which is linked to the local client device over a network using a remote display protocol, such as remote desktop protocol (RDP), PC-over-IP protocol (PCoIP), virtual network computing (VNC) protocol, or the like. Using the remote desktop protocol, the user can interact with applications of the virtual desktop, which are running on the remote host server, with only the display, keyboard, and mouse information communicated with the local client device. A common implementation of this approach is to host multiple desktop operating system instances on a server hardware platform running a hypervisor.
VDI provides a more centralized and efficient client environment that is easier to manage by enterprise IT administrators, who are able to respond more quickly to the changing needs of the user and the business. However, many issues with desktop management still persist in the VDI environment. For example, the IT department often needs to distribute updates or install new software to all desktops in the enterprise as part of an upgrade or migration process. It is usually desirable to perform such distribution of updates while the users are using their desktops so as not to disrupt normal business operations. If such a distribution were to be performed in a conventional VDI model, all of such updates would need to be distributed and installed on each and every virtual desktop. However, because each server in a data center typically hosts many different virtual desktops that share the physical resources of the server, such distributions/installations are likely to overwhelm a server's physical resources and degrade the overall user experience. A more efficient approach is desirable for distributing updates within a VDI environment of an enterprise.